Online social networking and dating provides opportunities to meet and socialize with new people. The development of such online social networks touch countless aspects of our everyday lives, providing access to people with similar mindsets, desires and interests, enabling us to form partnerships with more people.
One form of on-line social networking is through personals or on-line dating. A personals website allows its users to locate and communicate with other individuals with similar interests and desires. One of the common purposes of a personals website is to provide opportunities to pre-screen individuals in the context of dating. A user of the personals website will typically enter information about themselves, such as their likes, dislikes, activities, hobbies, education level and the like. This information is entered in the form of text or choosing from a standard set of values. The user will also typically include one or more pictures of themselves. The personal profiles can then be electronically searched to find matches. The searching can take many forms. For example, the search can be conducted by one user that is seeking particular attributes of the other users, such as particular height, body type, gender, location and the like. Such a search is simple because the information relating to these attributes is entered in the form of text or predefined values. However, this type of search is limited because the information for the users is often self-generated leading to potential inaccuracies. The attributes also tend to be relatively generic and applicable to many different individuals.
A primary motivation for including a picture with the user profile is so that other users can gauge relative attractiveness and other physical attributes of the user. However, these attributes are highly subjective and difficult to search for, resulting in users having to manually review the pictures of the user profiles. Therefore, it is with respect to these considerations and others that the present invention has been made.